In the Media

Ten years ago, Len Helfgott and Kathryn Anderson were celebrating their 30th anniversary with a dinner surrounded by friends in New York City. It was a wonderful night.
When the Bellingham couple woke up the next morning, the world had changed. The attacks of Sept. 11 had rocked the city and shocked the country. The couple spoke to The Bellingham Herald from New York on that Sept. 11 about what things were like in the city.
"We were looking for the Trade Center," Anderson said in an article written at the time. "We thought it was behind a set of buildings. And then we realized it just wasn't there."

Ten years ago Sunday was my first day back on the job after a tranquil vacation in the San Juan Islands.

There was no time to leisurely peruse my more than 100 email messages that had accumulated while I was gone. My editors sent me out on the street immediately to report on how South Sound residents were coping with the most deadly foreign attack on U.S. soil in the country’s 225-year history.

I started at the Olympia Fire Department’s downtown headquarters station. Grim-faced firefighters answered my questions patiently, but in a distracted way. Their thoughts and prayers were with what turned out to be 343 fallen brethren in New York City.

Western Washington University education students are required to do a short-term internship before graduating, with many students working in schools up and down Interstate 5.
But for a handful of WWU students, their student-teaching internships take them farther afield - to Kenya.
For the third time, Kris Slentz, part of WWU's special education department, is taking student interns to Kenya this winter to work in rural schools in an area known as Kasigau, in the southern part of the country near Tanzania.

Almost 200 creative writing professors have signed an open letter to Poets & Writers, criticizing its 2012 rankings of MFA/PhD programs. Poets & Writers is the bi-monthly magazine of the non-profit organization of the same name.

According to a statement attached to the letter, Poets & Writers first offense is that it does not take into account a program faculty’s reputation (reputation being the only thing a university or a career in creative writing have to offer anyway).

The rankings are based on polls of prospective creative writing program students about where they’re planning to apply, as well as the scholarship and financial aid money the schools offer.

Everyone expects next week's quarterly forecast of state revenue to be bad. Gov. Chris Gregoire says she is girding for a drop in revenue as deep as $1.5 billion — and some are predicting even worse numbers. Gregoire has asked agencies to identify $1.7 billion in cuts, or 10 percent of their budgets.

But for Gregoire to make the cuts herself without the help of the Legislature, she would have to take an equal bite out of every state agency — and she said Wednesday such across-the-board cuts aren't possible any more.

"I can't do across-the-boards. I've made that clear to legislative leadership," she told me after a meeting of the state Finance Committee. "That's a dry well right now."

Alberta's Tory dynasty will celebrate 40 years in power Tuesday, marking the second-longest majority rule in Canadian history.

It was the summer of 1971 when they first took office: iconic Doors frontman Jim Morrison had just been found dead in a Paris bathtub, the Pentagon Papers were making headlines and Gloria Steinem had just delivered her revolutionary Address to the Women of America.

Led by 43-year-old Peter Lougheed, the Progressive Conservatives won 46 of the 75 seats in Alberta's legislature, ushering in an era of majority rule exceeded only by the Nova Scotia Liberals, who dominated that province for 43 years, ending in 1925.

Even experts can't agree on how they've done it.

The unbridgeable gulf separating days before 9/11 from days after runs along a Manhattan street named — as if by chance — Liberty.
The street slices across Lower Manhattan and presses close to the World Trade Center site.
Issaquah resident Dana Macario, 33, endured the initial confused, chaotic moments after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks along Liberty Street.
On a cloudless morning 10 years ago, Macario — then Dana Luthy, a marketing coordinator at a top-flight law firm — boarded a subway train in Brooklyn for a short ride beneath the East River to Lower Manhattan. The young Western Washington University graduate headed to a 39th-floor office in 2 World Trade Center.

Harvard and Ohio State are not going to disappear any time soon. But a host of new online enterprises are making earning a college degree cheaper, faster and flexible enough to take work experience into account. As Wikipedia upended the encyclopedia industry and iTunes changed the music business, these businesses have the potential to change higher education.

Brooksville Elementary School global lab teacher Kathy Gates slipped out of the country for a few days during the summer to learn about our huge neighbor to the north and bring that information back to her students.

Western Washington University offers the "Study Canada" program to U.S. teachers at the elementary through secondary school levels.

There's a place where you can camp quietly by the riverside, listening to the peaceful flow and reconnecting with times long forgotten. It's the place to enjoy simple things and think deep thoughts about life, love and loss. It's the sort of place Norman Maclean would have written about.

This is not one of those places.

At least not during rafting season.

Welcome to Maupin. A tiny outdoor-adventure boomtown in Central Oregon that gets flooded every summer — and into autumn — with visitors who want to experience the legendary Deschutes River by raft or rod.